Federations

Ovoid. The fungus was a fleshy phallic red tower three meters high with orange gills, equipped with a dozen dangling whiplike arms that had green adhesive knobs at the tips. At the ends of most of the arms hung small forest creatures in various stages of digestion. As we watched, an unoccupied arm rose and shot forth, extended itself to three times its resting length, and by some neat homing tropism slapped its adhesive knob against a passing many- legger about the size of a cat. The beast had no chance to struggle; a network of wiry structures sprouted at once from the killer arm and slipped into the victim’s flesh, and that was that. We almost applauded.

“Let’s plant three of them in the hotel garden,” I said, “and post a schedule of feeding times. It’ll be a great show for the guests.”

“Shh,” Fazio said. He pointed.

Maybe fifty meters away a solitary Ovoid was gliding serenely along a forest path, obviously unaware of us. I caught my breath. Everyone knows what Ovoids look like, but this was the first time I had seen a live one. I was surprised at how beautiful it was, a tapering cone of firm jelly, pale blue streaked with red and gold. Triple rows of short-stalked eyes along its sides like brass buttons. Clusters of delicate tendrils sprouting like epaulets around the eating orifice at the top of its head. Turquoise ribbons of neural conduit winding round and round its equator, surrounding the dark heart-shaped brain faintly visible within the cloudy depths. The enemy. I was conditioned to hate it, and I did; yet I couldn’t deny its strange beauty.

Fazio smiled and took aim and put a numb-needle through the Ovoid’s middle. It froze instantly in mid-glide; its color deepened to a dusky flush; the tiny mouth tendrils fluttered wildly, but there was no other motion. We jogged up to it and I slipped the tip of my spore distributor about five centimeters into its meaty middle. “Let him have it!” Fazio yelled. I pumped a couple of c.c.’s of latchenango spores into the paralyzed alien. Its soft quivering flesh turned blue-black with fear and rage and God knows what other emotions that were strictly Ovoid. We nodded to each other and moved along. Already the latchenangos were spawning within their host; in half an hour the Ovoid, able once more to move, would limp off toward its camp to start infecting its comrades. It is a funny way to wage war.

The second Ovoid, an hour later, was trickier. It knew we had spotted it and took evasive action, zigzagging through a zone of streams and slender trees in a weird dignified way like someone trying to move very fast without having his hat blow off. Ovoids are not designed for quick movements, but this one was agile and determined, ducking behind this rock and that. More than once we lost sight of it altogether and were afraid it might double back and come down on us while we stood gaping and blinking.

Eventually we bottled it up between two swift little streams and closed in on it from both sides. I raised my needler and Fazio got ready with his spore distributor and just then something gray and slipper-shaped and about fifteen centimeters long came leaping up out of the left-hand stream and plastered itself over Fazio’s mouth and throat.

Down he went, snuffling and gurgling, trying desperately to peel it away. I thought it was some kind of killer fish. Pausing only long enough to shoot a needle through the Ovoid, I dropped my gear and jumped down beside him.

Fazio was rolling around, eyes wild, kicking at the ground in terror and agony. I put my elbow on his chest to hold him still and pried with both hands at the thing on his face. Getting it loose was like pulling a second skin off him, but somehow I managed to lift it away from his lips far enough for him to gasp, “Synsym—I think it’s synsym —”

“No, man, it’s just some nasty fish,” I told him. “Hang in there and I’ll rip the rest of it loose in half a minute —”

Fazio shook his head in anguish.

Then I saw the two thin strands of transparent stuff snaking up out of it and disappearing into his nostrils, and I knew he was right.

• • •

I didn’t hear anything from him or about him after the end of the war, and didn’t want to, but I assumed all along that Fazio was still alive. I don’t know why: my faith in the general perversity of the universe, I guess.

The last I had seen of him was our final day on Weinstein. We both were being invalided out. They were shipping me to the big hospital on Daemmerung for routine desporification treatment, but he was going to the quarantine station on Quixote; and as we lay side by side in the depot, me on an ordinary stretcher and Fazio inside an isolation bubble, he raised his head with what must have been a terrible effort and glared at me out of eyes that already were ringed with the red concentric synsym circles, and he whispered something to me. I wasn’t able to understand the words through the wall of his bubble, but I could feel them, the way you feel the light of a blue-white sun from half a parsec out. His skin was glowing. The dreadful vitality of the symbiont within him was already apparent. I had a good notion of what he was trying to tell me. You bastard, he was most likely trying to say. Now I’m stuck with this thing for a thousand years. And I’m going to hate you every minute of the time, Chollie.

Then they took him away. They sent him floating up the ramp into that Quixote-bound ship. When he was out of view I felt released, as though I was coming out from under a pull of six or seven gravs. It occurred to me that I wasn’t ever going to have to see Fazio again. I wouldn’t have to face those reddened eyes, that taut shining skin, that glare of infinite reproach. Or so I believed for the next ten years, until he turned up on Betelgeuse Station.

A bolt out of the blue: there he was, suddenly, standing next to me in the recreation room on North Spoke. It was just after my shift and I was balancing on the rim of the swimmer web, getting ready to dive. “Chollie?” he said calmly. The voice was Fazio’s voice: that was clear, when I stopped to think about it a little later. But I never for a moment considered that this weird gnomish man might be Fazio. I stared at him and didn’t even come close to recognizing him. He seemed about seven million years old, shrunken, fleshless, weightless, with thick coarse hair like white straw and strange soft gleaming translucent skin that looked like parchment worn thin by time. In the bright light of the rec room he kept his eyes hooded nearly shut; but then he turned away from the glowglobes and opened them wide enough to show me the fine red rings around his pupils. The hair began to rise along the back of my neck.

“Come on,” he said. “You know me. Yeah. Yeah.”

The voice, the cheekbones, the lips, the eyes—the eyes, the eyes, the eyes. Yes, I knew him. But it wasn’t possible. Fazio? Here? How? So long a time, so many light-years away! And yet—yet—

He nodded. “You got it, Chollie. Come on. Who am I?”

My first attempt at saying something was a sputtering failure. But I managed to get his name out on the second try.

“Yeah,” he said. “Fazio. What a surprise.”

He didn’t look even slightly surprised. I think he must have been watching me for a few days before he approached me—casing me, checking me out, making certain it was really me, getting used to the idea that he had actually found me. Otherwise the amazement would surely have been showing on him now. Finding me—finding anybody along the starways—wasn’t remotely probable. This was a coincidence almost too big to swallow. I knew he couldn’t have deliberately come after me, because the galaxy is so damned big a place that the idea of setting out to search for someone in it is too silly even to think about. But somehow he had caught up with me anyway. If the universe is truly infinite, I suppose, then even the most wildly improbable things must occur in it a billion times a day.

I said shakily, “I can’t believe—”

“You can’t? Hey, you better! What a surprise, kid, hey? Hey?” He clapped his hand against my arm. “And you’re looking good, kid. Nice and healthy. You keep in shape, huh? How old are you now, thirty-two?”

“Thirty.” I was numb with shock and fear.

“Thirty. Mmm. So am I. Nice age, ain’t it? Prime of life.”

“Fazio—”

His control was terrifying. “Come on, Chollie. You look like you’re about to crap in your pants. Aren’t you glad to see your old buddy? We had some good times together, didn’t we? Didn’t we? What was the name of that fuckin’ planet? Weinberg? Weinfeld? Hey, hey, don’t stare at me like that!”

I had to work hard to make any sound at all. Finally I said, “What the hell do you want me to do, Fazio? I feel like I’m looking at a ghost.”

He leaned close, and his eyes opened wider. I could practically count the concentric red rings, ten or fifteen of them, very fine lines. “I wish to Christ you were,” he said quietly. Such unfathomable depths of pain, such searing